Merry Xmas

Merry Xmas to one and all. :)

A Replicant of the Raptor Kind

Building a replicant starts with mimicking nature, something DARPA wants to do in building a bot able to fly like the Goshawk, the acrobat supreme of the raptor world. 

 "Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs. Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree," according to a statement in the announcement from Mark Micire,DARPA program manager. "The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before."

The focus is so firmly on developing a workable, independent flight intelligence, in fact, that DARPA doesn't even want to talk about what that intelligence would be flying in.

The last statement says it all, don't you think?

Northern Goshawk

Last Days - Why Wildlife Matters

Why wildlife matters.

14M/Hr

Interesting factoids regarding just how much $$ has gone into the never ending war machine since 9/11. 

American taxpayers have shelled out roughly $1.6 trillion on war spending since 9/11, according to a new report from Congress’ nonpartisan research arm. That’s roughly $337 million a day -- or nearly a quarter million dollars a minute -- every single day for 13 years.

The $1.6 trillion estimate, which comes to $14 million per hour since 9/11, from the Congressional Research Service is up roughly half a trillion dollars from its 2010 estimate, which found that the post-9/11 military operations are second only to World War II in terms of financial cost. 

It gets better.

Last week, a Defense Department official disclosed that since August, U.S. taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion -- or $8 million a day -- on air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Additionally, the Obama administration announced it is deploying 1,300 troops to Iraq in January.

The question to ask is: How successful have these operations been in improving the lives of the people said operations has impacted relative to the enormous profits accrued by the arms merchants supplying the hardware to do the deed? Something to think about, IMHO, as the infrastructure of the country continues to go down the tubes.

Voodoo Economics

David Stockman found religion in terms of intelligent economic analysis after his stint as Reagan's OMB director whereby Voodoo Economics reigned supreme, policies that did not work due to how the system was gamed, something very different to how Eisenhower ran things, a president who, IMHO, understood what sound economic policy was all about.

 Reaganomics (/reɪɡəˈnɒmɪks/; a portmanteau of Reagan and economics attributed to Paul Harvey)[1] refers to the economic policies promoted by U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. These policies are commonly associated with supply-side economics, referred to as trickle-down economics by political opponents and free market economics by political advocates.

The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to reduce the growth of government spending, reduce the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation, and tighten the money supply in order to reduce inflation.[2]

Stockman's latest missive, The Fracturing Energy Bubble Is the New Housing Crash, rings true regarding Shale Oil, fracking's first cousin, the one trick pony whose rather limited act is in its final phase of existence.

In short, the Fed exported bubble finance to the entire world, but most especially China and the EM. The upshot was an extended era of booming but phony global growth, and a consequent artificially high oil prices at $115 per barrel.

When central bank inflated oil prices were coupled with lunatic junk bond yields in the US shale patch at barely 300 bps over the central bank repressed yield on the US treasury note, the result was the same old bubble thing. Namely, a half trillion dollar flow of high yield bonds and loans to the energy sector, and a wholly artificial explosion of US shale liquids production from 1 million to more than 4 million barrels per day.

Like in the case of the housing bubble, the energy boom was an accident waiting to happen— testimony to another even grander experiment by the madmen running the world’s central banks.  It is now exploding right on schedule. The plunging graphs subsequent to the housing bust are now being re-gifted to the energy patch and all the bloated, unstable chains of finance and real economic activity which flow from it.

The graph above, which shows that every net job created in the US during the last seven years is attributable to the shale states, will be one of the first to morph into a less happy shape.

But there is something else even more significant. The global oil price collapse now unfolding is not putting a single dime into the pockets of American households—-the CNBC talking heads to the contrary notwithstanding.  What is happening is the vast flood of mispriced debt and capital, which flowed into the energy sector owning to the Fed’s lunatic ZIRP and QE policies, is now rapidly deflating.

That will reduce bubble spending and investment, not add to economic growth. It’s the housing bust all over again.

Any questions?

A new kind of inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition, a dark period of human history, has a very mild 2014 successor, in terms of torment and torture, when Spain drove out Google News using, you guessed it, copyright, to make it happen.

But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we’ll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. Let me explain why. This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it’s with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain.

The internet is a system of tubes, right?

Germany previously passed an unsuccessful law of this sort, but the difference is that most media companies waived their right to charge for excerpts because Google created so much traffic. 

To make sure that the Spanish version was more successful, language stipulates that media companies MUST charge! There is no choice in the matter. 

Here's more: 

Today [Google's new service] is available in more than 70 international editions, covering 35 languages. It's a service that hundreds of millions of users love and trust, including many here in Spain. It's free to use and includes everything from the world's biggest newspapers to small, local publications and bloggers. 

... For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that -- creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers' attention and for advertising Euros increased. We're committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues. 

Of course, this is not the whole story. From what we can tell and have reported before, copyright only was developed after the advent of the Gutenberg press. Its implementation was at least in part intended to slow the transmission of information that was undermining the sociopolitical and economic system of the time. 

It didn't work very well, of course. The Holy Roman Empire was riven by Lutheranism and eventually the "Divine Right of Kings" – which depended on the endorsement of the Church – also collapsed.

Thank god for fair use, at least in this country, otherwise, BRT, and other blogs like it, would cease to exist.

Happy Days are here again

Xmas came early to Wall Street when CT Representative Jim Himes shepherded in the gutting of

Dodd-Frank in the 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill passed by Congress by re enabling WS to use government backed monies to continue ginning the derivatives game for ever greater profits, thus eliminating risk due to the fact WS will get bailed out yet again, by us  rubes, when the market tanks, as it always does, based on the bubble mentality of how the banks, and significant others, manipulate money to game the system, using tech to make it happen.

Wall Street has for some time attempted to put taxpayers on the hook for its derivatives trades. I highlighted this a year ago in the post: Citigroup Written Legislation Moves Through the House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt:

Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:

Unsurprisingly, the main backer of the bill is notorious Wall Street lackey Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Goldman Sachs employee who has discovered lobbyist payoffs can be just as lucrative as a career in financial services. The last time Mr. Himes made an appearance on these pages was in March 2013 in my piece: Congress Moves to DEREGULATE Wall Street.

Betrayal always has consequences as the French found out when they had their violent revolution (1789 - 1799), based on Popular resentment of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy and aristocracy "that" grew during a financial crisis following two expensive wars and years of bad harvests. something our so called leaders are doing, in similar fashion, in 2014.

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.

–  Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, in 1928

Amendment 28 anyone?

The 1st Law

IMHO, the 1st law of Thermodynamics (The conversation of energy) is the most important 

scientific law articulated by man as it provides the raison d'ete as to how the quantum/relativistic reality, in which we all live, is powered. :)

Energy can be neither created or destroyed, only transformed.

Boltzmann and Wheeler are right, reality is information writ large. :)

The eventual successor to Glass

Tech never sleeps as seen by just how fast 3D printing has come along, not only in the first steps to print human organs using patient cells to start the process rolling but also in the first proof of concept to successfully merge electronics to contact lenses using the same tech to make it happen.

Michael McAlpine, the lead researcher, cautioned that the lens is not designed for actual use—for one, it requires an external power supply. Instead, he said the team created the device to demonstrate the ability to "3-D print" electronics into complex shapes and materials.

"This shows that we can use 3-D printing to create complex electronics including semiconductors," said McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "We were able to 3-D print an entire device, in this case an LED." 

The hard contact lens is made of plastic. The researchers used tiny crystals, called quantum dots, to create the LEDs that generated the colored light. Different size dots can be used to generate various colors. 

"We used the quantum dots [also known as nanoparticles] as an ink," McAlpine said. "We were able to generate two different colors, orange and green."

The contact lens is also part of an ongoing effort to use 3-D printing to assemble diverse, and often hard-to-combine, materials into functioning devices. In the recent past, a team of Princeton professors including McAlpine created a bionic ear out of living cells with an embedded antenna that could receive radio signals.

Things, they keep a changin. - Bob Dylan

If you don't love us...

Next kind of says it all, don't you think?